ABSTRACT
Thomas Mann’s great contribution to demonic modernity is to suggest that modern art is itself demonic. His own demonic masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, represents a tremendous synthesis of demonic German literature: along with the Russian, the most salient national tradition of demonic culture. But Mann’s Faustus is also a great wrestle with Germany’s demonic preoccupations. Faust of course was originally a German book and, as we shall see, Mann fights against Goethe’s great preceding German revision of the myth. From his exile in California in the darkest days of the Second World War, he saw that engaging this theme involved the danger of ‘flattering the Germans with their “demonism”’; 1 and he was disturbed by the enthusiasm of at least one visiting compatriot for his demonic work-in- progress. 2 For Mann intended no kind of excuse for, still less an endorsement of, the demonic. And if his combat with it in the end elicits great pathos, it is a pathos sharpened by enduring ambivalence and compounded by sheer exhaustion.
